Mutitjulu diary. Keywords: Creative writing Journal writing Creative nonfiction Uluru Mutitjulu Pitjantjatjara

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Jeremy Ellis
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1 University of Technology, Sydney Barbara Brooks : notes from February/March 1996 Biographical note: Barbara Brooks is a writer, independent scholar and lecturer in writing. Her first book, Leaving Queensland, was published by Sea Cruise, a small art press. She has published a biography of a major Australian novelist, Eleanor Dark: a writer s life (Macmillan, 1998). Her essays and stories have been published in the US, UK, Europe and Asia as well as in Australia. She has received grants and fellowships from the Australia Council, Varuna, Asialink, Watermark and Bundanon. She has a Doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney, where Verandahs, her novel as fictional memoir, won the UTS Chancellor s Award for an outstanding thesis. Extracts have been published in Heat, Griffith Review, Off the Edge (a Malaysian magazine) and Outskirts. Keywords: Creative writing Journal writing Creative nonfiction Uluru Mutitjulu Pitjantjatjara TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October

2 Prologue In 1985, I spent three months in Alice Springs, and visited remote communities. I met and talked mostly to white advisors lawyers, anthropologists, linguists, arts workers but also to indigenous people and overseas visitors. I had thought that the cities were where everything happened in Australia. I realised then that at the heart of our relationship with this country is the following question: with whom and how do we share this country? The question raises the issue of how to write in a way that acknowledges two histories, acknowledges indigenous presence and lives. Writing about my visit, I wanted to show the complex issues that created a confrontation between white European law and traditional law. I wanted to tell a story about a court case, which was difficult, even impossible, given issues about privacy and the ownership of stories, issues that indigenous people confronted every day. Eleven years later, in 1996, I obtained a permit from Pitjantjatjara Council to stay in the Mutitjulu community at Ayers Rock, with a friend who was the liaison officer between the community and the Uluru Ayers Rock National Park. I heard many stories; people shared stories with me. To tell these stories would be inappropriate without permission and context. What I could do was to say what I observed about place. I tried to report rather than judge, to describe rather than romanticise, though I use images and poetic language as a way of creating a portrait in words, and I don t want to sound humourless. Point of view and subjectivity have their own life. 27 February 1996 It s sunset, and outside the kitchen window Ayer s Rock is changing colour from red and ochre to lavender. This is our first night in Mutitjulu, the Pitjantjatjara community near Ayers Rock, south west of Alice Springs. Outside, the wind has come up; things are blowing around and banging; doors creak inside; plastic bags, hanging bat-shaped, rustle and flap in the trees. The wind sings in the trees which are small and spiky like up-ended straw brooms or dish mops. We stepped off the plane this morning, under an enormous sky with high cloud, into heat so dry it sucked us up in one slurp. If you come from the coast, it feels as if there's been a mistake: someone turned the central heating up too high, like in a department store in London in winter. We stepped out of the plane to a surprising blue and red and green landscape. But which way was out? I had a momentary feeling of claustrophobia, remembering that the sea was so far away. What was there this way? Country. That way? Country. Every way, miles of country. Soon the landscape itself captured our attention. J took us to the Cultural Centre, where we watched videos of people talking about ngura (rolling the rrrr), the country; the tjukurpa (more brisk rolling r sounds), law or dreaming or knowledge; people dancing, singing, telling story. An old Aboriginal man told the story about Lasseter dying in the desert, pining away for the loss of tea, bread, sugar. Women dancers carved long furrows in the red dirt. The Cultural Centre was low and curved, all brown wood, red concrete, earth walls, earthed yet light: those brown sheds, Marcia Langton called them where Gaudi TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October

3 meets the yu in central Australia? Inside: the intimacy of watching women painting each other's breasts, and the request not to climb the Rock. Outside: red soil, piles of brushwood as windbreaks, and the Rock rising in the gap between the buildings. We drove past the Rock and looked at its shapes and textures, caves and bulges we can't take our eyes away. We saw kurkaji or tinka a lizard, sand goanna or desert monitor outside the Ininti store, where we admired or gagged over t-shirts and souvenirs. The community store sold truck tyres, t-shirts, nectarines, coconut milk, ice blocks and frozen, furry kangaroo tails. 7 March 1996 It s morning in the Mutitjulu community. The house where I am staying is so close to the Rock, we can see it from the kitchen window, and walk to the base in fifteen minutes. I m fortunate to have a permit to stay here. On Monday night at sunset, we walked to the Rock from J's house, along a path through mulga bushes and brush with grey leaves. The sky was a soft blue and the moon had risen, close to full. The community was nearly empty, because of a big funeral. A low band of deeper blue appeared along the horizon until the sun disappeared behind the Rock. The sky shaded into soft apricot, and the moon started to glow. The face of the Rock glows at sunset; dozens of cars and tourist buses come to the approved parking spots sunset viewing spots. The cameras click. As we turned to walk back, picking desert plums and drinking water out of plastic bottles, the moon grew brighter and the first star came out above the Rock. We walked back through feathery brush that was black against the sky now, the sky that was still glowing. We heard the sounds of cars and voices in the distance, people coming back to the community after their ceremony, laughing and talking. A woman ranger stopped when she passed us on the road, and flashed her torch at us, wanting to know who we were. This morning, the flies are out before the sun is up. The sky is huge. Pink and orange along the eastern horizon, colours reflected on clouds, and on the Rock. There's a long sweep of curds and wisps of cloud, and, above the Rock, a weak moon, nearly full, slips in and out of view. Flycatchers swoop and circle around me in the air like acrobats as I walk along the first track, chasing after insects; we must attract the insects: these birds are always diving in loops around us and shooting past. The crows are big, glossy and healthy-looking. The wind starts. That wind sound is the desert-country sound; I notice it here because of the silence. Plastic bags flap in the wind, debris from the rent meeting before we came. A woman walks slowly towards the store, accompanied by dogs, while a white Toyota circles around the dirt tracks that run across and around the community. Now the sky is full of noise. There are two planes: one, the sunrise shift of the scenic flights, perhaps the morning flight over Uluru and Kata Juta, the Olgas; the other, small and black, seems higher, a commercial flight. TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October

4 On the other side of the community is the "straw house", the house where Bill Harney lived when he was a ranger. Anangu are camped on the side of the road there. I hear the kids talking and laughing, and see the shape of an adult standing with a blanket held around them. The sun hits the Rock and makes it glow for a few minutes before disappearing behind cloud. Trails of cloud spread across the sky, fanning out from the east. The white Toyota goes into the Works Depot, and a motor starts up, perhaps a generator. I walk back towards the house where I m staying, noticing the cross on top of the church for the first time. On the way, I turn off the sprinklers that water the small trees, and a bird somewhere in them makes a long trilling sound. The light has become uniform now, stronger and clearer, and the Rock and the soil look paler, as if light bleaches them. The sun emerges from a layer of cloud above the horizon and lights the tops of the trees, and the undersides of the leaves that are silver in a softer light, and were bronze a few minutes ago, turn green again. The white Toyota goes around again. I hear it over the sounds of dogs barking, water running inside the house, the same piece of black plastic we saw the day we arrived flapping in a tree across the road. Then someone coughing, an asthmatic cough I think, and a trill of bird sound. The planes again. And behind it all, that wind. All these noises overlay a deep still quietness, the quietness of space and slow processes of growth and decay, the quietness contained in an enormous bowl of sky, a horizon that comes down to your feet something I feel as a spaciousness that is not empty but present and powerful enough to slow things down to its own speed. It's twenty to eight. The sky is deep blue behind white cloud. The Rock changes colour: red, ochre, lavender. The striations and markings, brain-like patterns, hollows and caves show up more at certain times, as the light catches different aspects; and the size seems to change, depending on the point of view and time of day. There are jokes about Anangu pumping it up every night to satisfy the tourists. Here, this morning, the Rock seems huge, and I hear a car radio playing C & W, and someone whistling inside the house. I feel the first heat of the day, and I go inside. People move slowly here, in the heat, against the horizon, like the woman I saw walking to the store, but when they speak Pitjantjatjara, it's a fast, expressive language. Pukulpa Pitjama Ananguku Ngurakutu, the signs say, Welcome to Aboriginal Land. In this multilingual spot we listen to one of the traditional owners, Cassidy Uluru, telling a story about the tjukurpa in Pitjantjatjara, while a younger Aboriginal man translates into English. The visitors speak Japanese, Italian, German, Dutch, varieties of English from north of England to Texan; locals may speak other similar languages, too: Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra. Anangu, as the Pitjantjatjara people call themselves, are the traditional owners of this World Heritage listed Uluru-Kata Juta national park, to which they were given title in the 'handback' in 1985, and which they now lease to the Commonwealth Government. At the handback ceremony, Yami Lester, chairman of Pitjantjatjara Council, said to the Governor General, Ninian Stephen, I'm glad you're here to see the Rock for the last time. It was a joke with an edge. We are told, he said, that Aboriginal people are TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October

5 going to take it away from other Australians. Anangu leased the national park to the Commonwealth government, to ANCA, and joint management benefits everyone. Anangu are happy. There are posters in the Cultural Centre of Jennifer Taylor's painting called Working together, with brown and white people sitting round in a circle, round a table or a campfire, a centre of some kind, maybe the Rock itself, and beside and behind them, the brown footprints of Anangu rangers and trainee rangers, and the white shoeprints of the white men and women who are park rangers. Training and learning goes both ways. Edith Imantura Richards (1994) taught the white rangers to look after plants and animals. Edith can tell the difference between the tracks of different kinds of snakes in the dust. Talking about the plants and animals is inseparable from talking about people and country. Anangu stories retain knowledge of animals now extinct. 'You have to talk strongly for the ground, for the stories, for the hills, for the trees, for all the animals that walk around in this land, and for all of their names. That is why we have to talk strongly about the Tjukurpa, for the continuity of life.' I have been writing down place names in language: this country was named, and renamed, and now is being named again. Imanpa, Apatula, Pukatja (formerly Ernabella), Yunyarinyi, Wongellina, Pipalyatyare, Mimili, Kaltjiti (or Fregon), Amata, Iwantja (formerly Indulkana), and Mantamara over the WA border. The words on the paper don t carry the music of Anangu voices. We walk around here practising words like tjukurpa (rolling rrrs), panpanpalaya, kalaya junta, words we ve heard in the course of Anangu story-telling. We are trying to learn about this place. TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October

6 Research statement Research background The context of this work is my interest in writing about place and people in Australia in a way that acknowledges Indigenous presence and history. To research this, I visited Central Australia and read Indigenous and white writing. These journal notes come from a 1996 visit to the Pitjantjatjara community, Uluru. It questions how to record Pitjantjatjara life in a place that is both private (the community is closed) and sacred (a number of song lines converge on the Rock and areas around it) without transgression. Research contribution Creative nonfiction is used here to document and map place without a dominant narrative overlay. Sinclair (qtd. in Self 2007) distinguishes between the flaneur, the city walker, the walker who perhaps gets lost and the purposeful walker. My walking has a purpose; it is a journey of discovery. But I am lost in the space between cultures. The content of this extract from the Mutitjulu Diary represents what I learned from my research, my visit to Mutitjulu, and my conversations with people there. Mutitjulu Diary contributes to the volume of writing about this community. Research significance Wright (2002) speaks of writing that acknowledges all life is sacred. She quotes Galeano on rescuing the word from silence and paying respect to language. I start from a different silence, believing it is essential for writers to start from a position of acknowledging that we share this country. While not everything we write is about Indigenous presence and history, it is part of the context in which we write. I have published work in the genre of creative nonfiction, and incorporated other writing about my visit to Mutitjulu into my DCA thesis, which received the UTS Vice Chancellors Award. Works cited Richards, EI 1994 in S Breeden (ed) Uluru, East Roseville, NSW: Simon and Schuster, 90 Self, W 2007 Psychogeography, London: Bloomsbury Wright, A 2002 Politics of writing, Southerly 62 (2): TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October

Unit 2. Spelling Most Common Words Root Words. Student Page. Most Common Words

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